April 10, 2014

Tory legacy= a habitat for corruption

After four years of a Government who promised reform, we still have an election system that cheats all but the two main parties. We have peerages that can be bought by political donations, lobbyists who are free to buy favours and influence, and one civil servant who negotiated a £5 billion reduction in Deloitte’s tax bill retired months later and took a job with that company. Can we have a debate on whether the epitaph for this sorry Government should be, “They multiplied corruption and allowed it to flourish”?

I think the hon. Gentleman is wrong in several respects. In particular, it is not possible to buy peerages, and the House of Lords Appointments Commission is clear about its responsibility to make sure that that does not happen. Additionally, the hon. Gentleman should recognise that the coalition Government had a coalition programme that included giving the public the opportunity to make a decision on changes to the electoral system, and the public—the people whom we represent—chose not to do so.

Is not the most egregious example of the waste and futility of target setting what happened in the Boris Johnson's Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime? In seeking to set three targets for reducing crime, reducing costs and improving morale, it decided to have targets of 20%, 20% and 20% in what was an obvious way of headline chasing. Is the Chairman shocked by what we heard in evidence to his Committee and to the Home Affairs Committee? Although the Met has men and women of integrity in it who are entirely free of any corruption and are entirely honourable, the surprise is that, going back to the murder of Daniel Morgan 27 years ago, there are elements in the Met that are institutionally corrupt.

Our recommendation is that MOPAC should abandon targets. If it has slogans, they should be aspirations, not targets. The hon. Gentleman, who is on the Committee and for whose work I am grateful, is right that there are aspects of this that raise very serious questions about the ethics and values of the leadership of the police, particularly the Metropolitan police.